


as you broke in your wings, you forgot how to sing

by electrumqueen



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-21
Updated: 2010-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-07 10:46:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electrumqueen/pseuds/electrumqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she's seventeen years old, Joanna Harvelle goes to a tiny tattoo parlour three hours away from the roadhouse, and asks them to give her wings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as you broke in your wings, you forgot how to sing

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through 4x10, Heaven &amp; Hell.  
> Title &amp; cut-text from Bird On a Wire by Sarah Blasko, who is terrific. Jo and all of the other characters + setting are Kripke's et al!
> 
> Thank you very much to both aeternitasbeach and scorpiod1 , who put up with my babbling at them about this story, and made thinky thoughts on it so I could make it suck less! all sfm.

When she's seventeen years old, Joanna Harvelle goes to a tiny tattoo parlour three hours away from the roadhouse, and asks them to give her wings. _It’s a whim_, she tells Ash when she sneaks in, _it doesn't mean anything. This isn't my teenage rebellion__.  
_  
He stares at the feathers on her back and says, _what the hell, Jo_.

She shrugs. _Isn’t this what we do_, she says, _help people?_

\--  
_  
You’re the girl at the end of the world_, the demon says. It’s got black eyes; it's wearing the body of a sixteen year old boy with dark hair and pale smooth skin.

"Fuck off," Jo tells it. Dean’s been dead three and a half months. They’ve been getting cockier. "Whatever you're peddling, I’m not interested."

"Yeah you are," it says. "Dean Winchester’s in Hell. He’s screaming."

She shoots it in the head.

\--

Four month mark, and not that she's been keeping track, but her mom has, worried about Sam and Bobby. Jo's cleaning guns by the window of the shitty motel they're holed up in right now, fingers sticky with grease and smelling of gunpowder.  
_  
Dean Winchester is out of Hell_ echoes through her head and it hurts; she drops everything and clamps her hands over her ears.

_Well done, Castiel,_ follows it and Jo can't breathe for the hurting-- and she's a hunter, she's got a _high_ pain tolerance but this is s_omething else_.

"Mom," she breathes, "_Mom._" And then she passes out.

\--

She wakes up in a hospital bed, breathing in whiteness and antiseptic. "Well," she says, "that sucked."

Mom says, "Joanna Beth Harvelle," and Jo winces.

"m’I in trouble?" she asks.

"Jesus Christ, Jo, I couldn't wake you up."

She wants to say, _they were so loud_, but she can't. She doesn't know who they are, and that-- more than anything else, more than the worry in Mom's eyes and the IV in Jo’s arm-- that is the thing that scares her. She coughs, instead. "Sorry, Mom," she says.

"Don’t be sorry," Mom says, half-choking, "_be okay._"

Jo catches her breath like she's seven and it's a firefly in a jar, unsteady and ready to escape. "Mom," she says, "I love you," and she sits up and puts her arms around her mother and holds her close until they both feel closer to sane.

\--

Demons start bird-dogging them soon after that, flies to rotting flesh. They can't go anywhere without something trying to get through a salt line; windows down is a thing of the past.

Mom spends all the time they're not killing black smoke in little girls' bodies with her cell glued to one ear, muttering at Bobby about concentrations here and there and _is there anything we can do to make them let up?_ and occasionally, _Winchester_, which is the closest to a profanity either of them can muster after this long in a war.

Jo shakes her hair out of her eyes in-between loading her shotgun with holy water ampoules, pretends she can't hear the voices whispering about Lucifer dragging himself out of the pit. She knows Mom's worried about her, about the way she's gotten scary-efficient, like she's a Winchester or something-- bred to kill. (What Mom doesn't know won't hurt her, and Jo can't think about the way the voices mutter _the end of days is coming_ when she's elbow deep in the guts of what used to be a priest.) She sighs, pulls her knee up to rest her elbow on, and takes her shot.

\--

Four miles out of Alabama, Jo gets dragged down a stretch of road by two sorority girls with black eyes and ripped, tattered cheerleading uniforms. She is multitasking, thinking _what a fucking cliché_ at the same time she is fumbling with the rope that's scoring deep into her wrists, trying to get it off. the knife in her boot is easy to reach, but the scary part is when she doesn't grab it in time to be tied into a chair in the middle of a series of circles that make her feel sick just looking at them.

"Angel," one of them hisses, right into her ear, and its breath stinks like sulfur and Jo dry-retches, just with the hint of it in her mouth. "The things we're going to do to you--"

That right there is when Mom bursts in with a gun and several locals, and shortly after that Jo is stretched out in the back of the car with an icepack to her ribs breathing in deep, just because the air smells like aircon and dust. But it's not Hell, so that makes it incredibly fucking _awesome_.

"We’re going to see Bobby," Mom says, tense no-nonsense voice, sharp like when five-year-old Jo refused to eat her vegetables.

"Mom--" Jo says, and then her ribs twinge and she thinks about the way they looked at her-- worse than prey, worse than they look at people-- like _enemy_\-- and she shakes her head and murmurs so quiet she can barely hear herself, "okay."

\--

The first thing Bobby does when they pull into his driveway is settle Jo into his bed with a mug of hot chocolate spiked with something sharp and alcoholic, and brush a gentle Bobby-kiss across the top of her head. "Hey baby girl," he says, even though Jo is far from a baby anymore, "you've been through the wars."

_I’m a hunter,_ Jo thinks, half-bitter,_ this is what I do. We live for the wars. Peacetime doesn't need us. _Instead she grins at him because it's Bobby and he loves her, and manages something about not wanting to put him out of his bed.

"Don’t you worry," he tells her, "your daddy would kick my ass if I let his little girl fall over on the floor."

It's the alcohol mixed with her pain pills making her loose and buzzy that lets her inhibitions dissipate for a little while, and she feels sharply sad for a moment saying, "My Daddy wouldn't care; he's mad at me." But then her ribs are pounding and the scrapes on her forearms and legs are stinging and she's safe, nowhere else quite like this, so she curls into the warm Bobby-smell of the pillow and the sheets and falls asleep.

"Your dad wouldn't ever do anything but love you," Bobby says, low rasping burr of his voice gentle, slipping into the edge of her dreams.

It’s weird but she can't quite place how she knows he's lying.

\--

"Hey, Jo," Dean says.

It’s Dean goddamn Winchester, so she has two initial reactions; shoot the motherfucker, and kiss him hard. She’s Joanna Beth Harvelle, so she takes a deep breath and does neither, extending a brisk, calm hand. "Heard you got out of Hell." (Heard from angels first, and then Mom, with her phone tight against her ear and Bobby Singer on the other end.)

He shrugs, cocky but with damage glaring hard and raw in the backs of his eyes, squeezing her hand gentle, 'cause he's _Dean_. "Bastards couldn't handle me. You okay?"

She’s got a blanket over her and she's sitting in an armchair, mostly better, just twinging in places. "Apparently, Hell's after me," she says, shrugging back, "but what the fuck else is new?"

"My brother's fucking a demon," Dean says, twist of his mouth like a bruise, marring the lines of his face. "Her name is Ruby."

"Okay," Jo says, "well. That’s new. Has Mom tried to kill her yet?"

Dean grins, ruefully. "I came this close to not stopping her."

\--

"So you got demons on your ass," Sam says, staring hard at Jo like she is a bug under glass. He is fucked in the head; this is something she knows.

Jo raises an eyebrow, refusing to give an inch. "Maybe you can give me a membership card. Or some tips. Maybe even both."

Bobby’s eyes say, _what the hell, Jo._

Jo doesn't know why Sam is making her skin crawl; except that she kind of does and it all has to do with black smoke crowding his eyes, and his voice, low and dangerous. She’d think she would be over that by now, but evidently not.

Mom’s hand on her wrist is soothing, reassuring. "Yeah, Sam," she says. "No matter what we do--"

Jo laces her hands together, staring at the roughness of her fingertips. "I’m going to get a glass of water," she says, getting up with no grace and a little drag, but she's balanced on two feet so that's a win.

\--

Dean meets her in the kitchen. "Jo," he says.

She looks at the ground, takes a deep breath. "Don’t tell Mom," she says, "promise me. You can't tell Mom this, okay? She’ll just freak out and it will suck and--"

He puts his hand on her shoulder; she can't control the flinch and he steps back, looking down to catch her gaze, and bringing their eyes back up. "I promise," he says. (He is probably lying. This is _Dean Wincheste__r_, after all.)

"I’m hearing voices," she says, words tripping over each other in their rush to flee her mouth. "How’s Uriel? I bet he's pissed at you-- 'cause you didn't kill a witch, 'cause Samhain rose. I’m hearing_ angels,_ Dean." she closes her eyes, waiting for him to call her mom.

"Okay," Dean says, swallowing audibly. "We know this girl. She’s a psychic. She hates angels, but-- she can help."

Jo’s mouth twists itself into an ugly parody of a grin. "Yeah," she says, quotation marks visible in her own voice. "_Help_."

\--

Pam Barnes grins at Jo under sunglasses that reflect the light, shiny and black. "Hey," she says. "Just breathe in deep, and trust me."

Jo thinks about how fucking pointless trust is, as an exercise: it gets you all of nowhere or it gets you _dead_. "Sure," she lies, blithely, slipping her hands into Pam’s.

\--  
_  
Oh,_ Jo says. _Oh._  
_  
So this is who I am._

\--

Her wings may be busted and she may have lost everything that ever made her real, but she's still _Jo _and she's an _angel_, and while that's _fucked the hell up_ it's nothing new, easy even, to slide into.

\--

Pam clatters out the door with horror written in the set of her mouth and Jo thinks about Castiel (who is pretty much the angelic equivalent of the littlest engine that could) and eyeballs. She presses the heel of her hand against her forehead and leans back in her chair.

Mom says, shaky voice, "Jo?"

Jo shrugs. "Hi, Mom," she says. "Still me, you know? Just. _More_."

"_Angel_," Bobby says, all disbelief and trembling hands.

"Explain, please," Sam says. He’s looking kind of pale.

"It’s not that complicated," she says, but she stands up anyway, so she's not the smallest in the room.

Ruby, Sam's demon-squeeze, flickers her a cautious wary look. Like she's dangerous or something. (Which she is, but it doesn't stop Jo feeling strange and sick inside.)

"So," she starts, "there's this thing, that angels have. Like power? It’s what defines us, what makes us holy. We call it Grace."

Mom flinches when Jo says _us_, which hurts, but can't be helped.

"They told me to watch you guys. Earth. After the war, the big one. I didn't want to." (It’s weird, who she used to be; there's almost a dissonance when Jo thinks about herself.) She scratches her wrist, moves on. "I mean, at the start I was fine, but after four thousand years-- four thousand years is a _fuckload_ of time, you can't even comprehend-- and He was gone, our Father, He _left_, so I--

"Being an angel is so different, from being human. _So different_. I just wanted to be loved, to love. I’d watch, all of the love down here, all of the hate, all of the anger and the bitterness, and-- the joy. The joy is what got me. So I ripped my Grace out of my chest and flung myself to Earth--you wanted a baby, Mom, so-- here I am."

She pauses, for effect, and grins. "Bet this makes that crush I had on you awkward, huh, Dean."

\--

"So they kicked you out of the big boys' club, huh?" Jo's sprawled out on her back, in Bobby's panic room, staring at the ceiling. It’s grey and bare. She wonders if Bobby'd mind if she put up some posters, or something-- they'd probably interfere with the sigils.

Ruby smirks at Jo, crossing her legs at the knee. "Maybe I just wanted to hang out with you."

Jo raises an eyebrow. "Yeah," she says, carefully sardonic, "sure."

Ruby laughs, running a hand through a girl-in-a-coma's long dark hair. "Don’t knock good intentions."

"That would be easier to believe," Jo says, "if I believed you had any."

"I’m hurt," Ruby says, pressing her left palm to her borrowed heart. "Coming from a fallen angel."

Jo blinks, thinking about falling. She hadn't really thought of herself as being _fallen_, so much, before. Just-- not in Heaven. She shakes her head, to clear out the doubt (that's what got her into this mess, after all; doubt and curiousity and everything else that messes with cats, though she's always been more of a dog person herself--) and digs the pot she bought before she started hearing angels out of the bottom of her backpack. "C'mon," she says, "let's get high."

Ruby says, "You’re deluding yourself, you know. If you think you're okay with this."

Jo's hand shakes a little, as she lights up. "Maybe I’m not," she says. "Do you want some or not?"

\--

"So how come you're talking to me?" Ruby asks, breathing out a smooth smoky _o_.

The air smells sharp and sweet. Jo's not going to lie, she hates the smell of pot, but she loves the way it makes her feel, loose and sharply lovely. "Should I be not?" she asks, world-weary, with all the knowledge of _people_ she gained, in four thousand years. "I fell. You fell in love. It kind of cancels itself out, in the end."

Ruby's eyes skitter away from hers, quick flutter of eyelash indicating discontent. "I don't think anything could ever cancel you out," she says.

Jo half-smiles. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?"

"I’m not--" Ruby says, staring at the floor. "It’s not what you think it is."

"Be careful," Jo warns her; she's not sure on whose behalf she's speaking. "Winchesters are a whole other level of fucked in the head."

"I’m from _Hell_," Ruby protests.

"Just sayin'," Jo says, and snags the joint back.

\--

There’s shouting from upstairs. Jo and Ruby are both kind of blissed out, so they don't really register anything until Mom's voice cuts sharply through, _you are not taking my daughter, you angelic sons of bitches, I don't care what you think she is_, and both of them sit up and try to get sober very very quickly.

Jo sighs, scrubbing a hand over her face. "I should've seen this one coming, huh."

"Maybe," Ruby says, "those your bosses?"

Jo laughs. "Probably my subordinates. I was kind of a big deal."

There are loud thumps.

Ruby's eyes show _worry_ and Jo knows she's thinking about Sam, maybe even Dean. "Is there anything you can do, to stop them?"

"Ugh," Jo sighs, slipping a knife out of her boot, making a quick incision along her wrist. "Fuck my life." she draws the sigil in quick, clean lines, steps back to admire her work. "That should hold them for a little while."

Ruby says, "I can throw some hex bags together. They’ll keep everyone out."

Jo shakes her head. "They know where we are, now. We better go upstairs. Mom's gonna be _pissed_."

\--

Mom is _incredibly_ pissed, incandescent with fury and kind of gorgeous with it. "Joanna," she says, "you gotta tell me what the fuck is going on."

Dean shoots her a slow, assessing look. "Are you _high_?"

Ruby shivers, pulling herself together. "There were _angels_ here."

"They wanted to _kill you_," Bobby says, and he sounds worried, angry even, which from _Bobby _shows you you're in trouble. "Jo--"

"Who was it?" she asks, biting her lip hard.

"Castiel," Sam says, slow, wary. "And Uriel."

"Son of a _bitch,_" Jo breathes. "Okay," she says. "Okay. They are gonna want to kill me."

Mom quirks her mouth, like, _oh yeah, really_.

"Because if the demons get her," Ruby picks up, "they're gonna have walking radio. And a real live angel to you know, be pleasant to."

"Kittens and puppies all the way," Jo says, bottom of her stomach falling out.

"Okay," Mom says. "You can defend yourself-- defend us-- if you have your Grace back, right? It’s gotta be around here something."

Jo's breath puffs out of her, frustrated. "Mom," she says. "It’s not that simple--"

Ruby touches her shoulder. "Actually," she whispers, in Jo's ear, "it kind of is."

\--

It’s like a family roadtrip, only _ridiculous_ and _awful_. They spill into two cars-- Dean and Jo and Mom in the Impala, Ruby and Sam and Bobby in one of Bobby's junkers, travelling down to where Mom was when she got pregnant, when Jo flung herself from Heaven.

Mom is all worry and fear in the edges of her eyes, the set of her shoulders and her mouth; every time she looks at Jo there's a flinch hiding in the controlled stillness of her muscles.

Jo sprawls out in the back, fiddling with Ruby's hex bag, missing her wings (and missing the ignorance of them). One of these days, she's gonna figure out how it works.

\--

Dean says, "Jo--"

She bites her lip, hard, looking around the gas station they've stopped at, flickering up and down the stack of Doritos bags. "I’m sorry," she says. "I don't know why they pulled you out. It was after I fell."

His eyes are lost and hurt and _so_ sad.

She leans forward, hand on his cheek._ I’m sorry_, she whispers, kissing his cheek, looping her arms around his neck. "I bet it's 'cause you're hot shit, though."

He laughs, unconvincingly. "Sure," he says. "Story of my life." The light from the freezers filled with Coke and Sprite bottles glows eerie white, bright across his cheekbones.

\--

Of_ course_ they're too late. Jo presses her palm to the tree that grew from her Grace, fancies that the tattoos on her shoulder blades are buzzing, even, in recognition.

Uriel offers Dean a deal; Jo for his continued presence on earth. Mom's face goes white.

Jo closes her mouth so the words stop spilling out, but they're on repeat in her head. "I understand," she tells Dean, "if you want to--"

"Don’t be stupid," Sam says, and he's grinning a little bit, "I have a _plan_."

\--

Mom-- Ellen -- says, "It's gotta be you, Dean."

Dean looks like he wants to throw up. "Ellen--"

Jo swallows, hard. "Castiel and Uriel won't believe anyone else. You have to tell them you'll let them take me if they don't kill Sam."

Ruby tucks her hair behind her ear. "This is going to _suck_."

Jo says, "I’m really sorry." She rubs her thumb across a cut she's managed to acquire on her wrist. The pain is a sharp pinprick; it reminds her of what she is right now (mortal, and vulnerable, and _scared_).

"Not your fault," Ruby says, "it's just, you know, going to suck. Alastair is a creepy motherfucker, even for Hell."

Sam puts his hand on her shoulder. "We really appreciate it," he says.

"You’d better," Ruby says, but there's something softer, more comfortable in her eyes.

\--

Ellen is sitting in Bobby's room, staring blankly out the window. The line of her back is tense, worried.

Jo knocks once, on the open door. "Mom?"

"Hey, Jo," she says, not turning around.

Jo feels fragile, standing in the doorway. She wraps her arms around herself, and then shakes her hair out of her eyes in a quick decisive motion, turning to shut the door behind her. "I’m still your daughter," Jo says, and pulls her flannel button-down up and over her head. She knows that the wings are visible over the lines of her bra, feathers clear and sharply delineated. "Look at me: this is always who I’ve been. I just didn't know it." She stares at the blank wood of the door, feeling the weight of her mother's eyes on her shoulders. "No matter what," she says, realizing, for the first time, that it's true, "Mom, no matter what, I’m going to be Joanna Beth Harvelle, and I am going to love you, and I am going to be your daughter and Dad's. _No matter what_."

The silence is thick and sticky, but Jo's feeling peaceful and settled, somewhere inside. She pulls her shirt back on, kisses her mother's hair, and goes to find Sam and Bobby.

\--

It’s a showdown, after all. Carefully orchestrated, incredibly uncomfortable. Jo hangs back with Mom and Dean, goes breathless at the sight of Ruby, weak and sickly pale, knowing it's all for _her._

Uriel goes for the demon, and Jo's Grace slips out of the suit he's wearing, shimmering bright white-blue, hanging on a silver chain.

She sucks in a breath at the glory of it, at the way it feels like _home,_ just looking at it. Everything in her is reaching for it, but at the same time-- to be divine, is to lose most everything she was. (To lose _Mom_.)

Mom looks at her. "That it?" she asks.

Jo swallows. "Yeah," she says. She takes a step forward, catching herself, torn.

"We have to close our eyes, yeah," Mom says, sharply, and then she's sprinting forward, chain looped around her hand and she's yanking Jo's Grace off Uriel's neck, tossing it to her in an easy overhand throw.

"Everyone, _close your eyes_," Jo shouts, feeling her Grace pulse in her hand and she leans close to her mother and whispers, "I love you, Mom," and "It's going to be okay just you wait and see--"

And then she throws it to the ground, watches the light spill out; then the power floods through her veins, electric, and she's

gone.


End file.
